lengau @ lengau @midwest.social

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8

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934

Joined

1 yr. ago

Ahh, well that's a different thing. The snap though is maintained by the VideoLAN folks and part of their official repo.

I use snaps on multiple non-Ubuntu systems because they solve problems for me in a cleaner way than anything else has done so far.

I also find arch-based distros to often be quite obnoxious to manage, but that's just me.

I'm using Ubuntu (well Kubuntu everywhere that I have graphical displays) on most devices, but I have:

• SteamOS on my Steam Deck
• Arch on my PinePhone
• Debian on some development boards
• Fedora and OpenSUSE in VMs because I'm interested in their development

Cloud-init is way underappreciated IMO. One of the reasons I like using Ubuntu on the gazillion little development boards I have is that they have cloud-init on all their preinstalled images, so I can drop in a file that correctly configures the network (some of my raspis are on wifi due to location), sets up my user (including importing my SSH ID from GitHub so I can keep SSH only key based), adds the relevant packages and even repositories that I want, etc.

I wish more distros would include cloud-init in more than just their cloud images.

Configuring Kubuntu for my liking is way easier than configuring mint for my liking, and some of that mint configuration is going out of the way to undo things the mint maintainers did intentionally.

Switching Firefox from the apt repo to the snap is one of the things I did when using KDE Neon on my laptop (on my desktop with Nvidia I did the opposite on Kubuntu).

I don't know what you mean about VLC though - while it's available as an official snap published by VideoLAN, it's also in the apt repos on all Ubuntu versions.

I have my own criticism of Canonical, but most of what I hear from the anti-Ubuntu crowd isn't even grounded in reality.

My favourite one recently was that upstart was Canonical NIHing systemd.

Ironic - one of the reasons I like Ubuntu based distros is the easy access to snaps.

"Don't feed the trolls" has ended up with the trolls running the place. I'd rather Lemmy not become yet another "lol ubuntu sux" echo chamber.

It might be time to upgrade

https://github.com/canonical/snapd

That's pretty fundamentally not how flatpak works. It could theoretically be modified to do all of that, but by that point you're recreating snapd and it would likely be easier and more straightforward to start with the current snapd and change what you dislike about it.

There was an open backend for a while. A complete lack of interest killed it.

No, I do that for free, because it's a net benefit to me.

Flatpak doesn't manage system services.

It does.

I use snaps on multiple non-Ubuntu systems, because they provide capabilities I haven't been able to find elsewhere without having to manually manage updates, security issues, etc.

Yes, snaps are widely used so naturally people hate them too.

Ubuntu Core works by having everything on the system, kernel included, be a snap. Or, as another way of describing the same thing, everything on the system is installed by mounting a squashfs image (which by its nature is read-only) and applying groups to the processes in those images. This applies all the way down to the level of the kernel, although a kernel snap, on install or upgrade, does write out to a boot partition.

The net result is that you get many of the benefits of immutability, but also many of the benefits of traditional distros. For example, you can replace the kernel snap (and even build your own kernel snap if you choose) without replacing the rest of the base system, since the kernel is installed separately from the base. This is especially important for non-x86 systems that may need different (mutually incompatible) kernel builds for different SOCs, but even on x86 an example of replacing parts like that is NVIDIA drivers. But you don't need a separate version of cups just because you have an Nvidia GPU. And because cups is in its own snap, it's isolated too. You get the same benefits of confinement that applies to desktop apps, but for services, where it can be even stricter. After all, cups doesn't need to even know that you have a GPU, so an attack vector of hacking cups and then using it to attack your GPU gets foiled in a way that an immutable base with unconfined services doesn't.

I once worked for an American company that had a requirement that if you're using company money to pay for a meal, you tip at least 20%.

That was very awkward in some countries...